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This chapter surveys some of the salient characteristics of the ancient Greek accent system: its phonetic nature (traditionally described as a ‘pitch accent’); the contrast between acute and circumflex accentuations; the phonological limitations on the placement of the accent (law of limitation and sōtêra rule); accentual properties of word-final diphthongs; proclitics and enclitics; and accentuation of Greek dialects other than Koine. A concluding section explores the extent and consistency of the information on the accentuation of Hellenistic Koine.

Chapter 2 describes the phonological development. Both languages underwent fundamental changes in quantity and prosodic structure. Open syllable lengthening (and sometimes consonant lengthening) eliminated light stressed syllables, and ‘overlong (superheavy)’ syllables were eliminated by vowel shortening and led to substantive changes in vowel qualities. Widespread diphthongization of long vowels affected both languages, and old short vowels were lowered in Icelandic. This prevented large scale mergers of old short and long vowels. A change called ‘the West Nordic consonant shift’ affected the obstruent system, so that aspiration (both post‐ and preaspiration) developed, and new postvocalic unaspirated stops fill some gaps left by the aspitation of the old fortis coda consonants. A particularly interesting development is the Verschärfung, occurring in Faroese, creating geminate stops in historical hiatus forms. The historical distinction between weak or ‘restricted’ and ‘full’ syllables valid in Common West Nordic is maintained in Faroese but abolished in Icelandic.

This chapter concentrates on the vowel system of Modern Icelandic, describing the correlation between long vowel nuclei (in open syllables) and short vowel nuclei (in closed syllables). Both monophthongs and diphthongs participate in the length correlation, creating typologically uncommon short diphthongs. Some of the long monophthongs show a tendency to diphthongize, creating ‘new’ diphthongs. An element theoretic analysis of the monophthongal system is presented and correlated with findings of acoustic analyses. The so called ‘phonemic diphthongs’, which participate in morphophonemic alternations, are analysed as branching phonemic units, consisting of one of the monophthongal vowel colours, followed by a glide /i/ or /u/. Some of those diphthongs occur before hiatus, raising the question of the analysis of length and syllabification in forms like daginn [taij ɪn] ‘the day’. It is maintained that there is no systematic difference between vowel systems in initial (stressed) and non‐initial (unstressed) syllables in Modern Icelandic.

The chapter starts with an overview of Faroese vowels and diphthongs, describing the correlation between the ‘long’ and ‘short’ systems. An element theoretic analysis of monophthongs and diphthongs is presented. The diphthongal system of Faroese is considerably richer than the Icelandic one, and the relation between the systems of open syllable vowels and closed syllable vowels more complex; there is greater dialect variation in Faroese. Hiatus forms raise interesting questions of analysis and in addition to the historical skerpingin (Verschärfung), diphthongization and vowel raising (not properly described before) cause variation in the modern usage. The unstressed vowels of Faroese tend to be reduced, even syncopated. There are thus three types of environment for vocalic nuclei in Modern Faroese: full syllables (open or closed), and restricted syllables. Each of these environments has its own (sub)system, and the number of vocalic oppositions allowed in each environment is different.

This chapter proposes a historical account of the Greek ‘law of limitation’, the restrictions on the distance from the end of the word where the accent may fall. It argues that reanalysis of forms whose prehistoric accentuation already ‘conformed’ to the (not yet existing) law played a crucial role. This reanalysis was prompted not only because a surprisingly large number of the commonest prehistoric word forms already ‘obeyed’ the law of limitation, but because they displayed a specific kind of accent alternation within the paradigm that the law of limitation would later produce. This account also entails a new historical account of the behaviour of some word-final diphthongs as ‘short for accentuation’ and others as ‘long for accentuation’. More tentatively, a new historical explanation for the recessive accentuation of most finite verb forms is proposed. An appendix provides a brief analysis of the prevocalic metrical treatment of accentually ‘short’ and ‘long’ final -ai/-oi before vowels in Homer.

This chapter examines Simon Emmerson’s Time Past IV, a hauntingly beautiful work which is highly accessible thanks to its consistent tonality and economical construction. This piece is based entirely on a single hexachord and its transposition. The vocal part consists of mellifluous syllabic fragments taken from Shakespeare’s well-loved Sonnet XXX. Space-time notation is employed, affording a degree of freedom within the disciplined structure. The music moves along quite naturally, and it is only in the more frenetically active passages that timing could go awry. The chapter illustrates how Emmerson is punctilious in every detail. The work describes a logical arc, from its soft, rapt beginning, through a period of manic activity, and back to a poignant, contemplative ending. The text is used imaginatively: there are speech effects such as whispering, and diphthongs are stretched out, mutating gradually through their components. The pre-recorded electronic accompaniment provides a multicoloured palette of vocal attacks and timbres, with babbling syllabic repetitions that overlap and constantly transform themselves.

This chapter discusses the phonology of the west Midlands. Topics covered include short vowels; long vowels; diphthongs; unstressed vowels; consonant phonology; stops; nasals; fricatives; and approximants. The vocalic inventory is presented in a structure based on Wells' lexical sets. The chapter presents supporting evidence for patterns of use and change in progress.

This chapter analyzes labial harmony systems such as Turkish, other Turkic languages, and several other languages. Labial harmony rarely occurs by itself, often co-occurring with palatal harmony in Turkic languages. After a detailed analysis of vowel harmony in Standard Turkish—which pays extensive attention to disharmonic roots—the chapter offers a typology of labial harmony systems in Turkic languages in general, based on several typological studies. Other topics that receive special attention are epenthetic vowels, labial attraction, defective patterns, dependencies among different harmonies, diphthongs, stand-alone labial harmony, and the decline of labial harmony in a wide variety of Turkic languages.

This study compares the acoustic and articulatory properties of the Romanian mid diphthong /ea/ to the hiatus sequence /e.a/, and the high diphthong /ja/ to the hiatus sequence /i.a/. Both acoustic and articulatory (EMA) data support the analysis of the mid diphthong as forming a complex nucleus, consistent with its phonotactic behavior. This diphthong exhibits the greatest temporal overlap between the two vowels and the largest coarticulation/blend between its vocalic targets. The hiatus sequence /i.a/, which spans two syllables, shows the least overlap and coarticulation. The high diphthong /ja/ is a tautosyllabic sequence, displaying an intermediate degree of overlap, more similar to /ea/ than to hiatus sequences in its timing properties.

In this chapter, I focus on vowel phonemes. Because a study that is strictly based on a distinction between legal and illegal spellings has some serious problems, this chapter employs a more descriptive and qualitative approach. I discuss how the first graders in the study spelled each vowel phoneme of English. What do the children’s spellings reveal about their knowledge of the English writing system and about their knowledge of spoken English? The analyses reported in Chapter 3 uncovered some factors that affect how children spell phonemes. For the children in this study, the most important of these factors was exposure to phoneme-grapheme correspondences in printed words: Children used frequent correspondences more often than infrequent correspondences. Another factor was letter names: Children used correspondences in which the name of the grapheme contained the phoneme more often than correspondences in which the name of the grapheme did not contain the phoneme. A third factor was formal teaching: Children were more often correct on correspondences that were taught in the classroom than on correspondences that were not directly taught. In this chapter, I ask how these and other factors influenced the children’s spelling of specific vowel phonemes. Sometimes, the children’s choices of spellings for vowel phonemes mirrored the choices embodied in the English writing system. The children used the spellings that occur most frequently in English, whether or not these spellings were explicitly taught. In other cases, the children’s choices did not mirror the conventional ones. There are two different ways in which this occurred. First, the children sometimes used a spelling that is illegal in the conventional system; that is, a grapheme that never represents the phoneme. In these cases, something other than knowledge of conventional spelling must explain the “invented” spelling. I ask what the reasons are. In discussing these illegal substitutions, I have chosen, somewhat arbitrarily, a cut-off of 2.5%. Illegal substitutions that occurred at rates of 2.5% or more out of all spellings are singled out for discussion. A second way in which children’s choices sometimes failed to mirror those of conventional English was in overuse of particular spellings.

Some useful concepts and the building blocks of any grammatical description are summarized in this chapter (hence its title). The glossary, at the end of the book, includes notions specific to individual parts of grammar. The chapter discusses the structure of sound systems and the notion of phoneme, and the unit ‘word’. Inflection and derivation are defined. The chapter then turns to the principles behind delineating word classes, grammatical categories and their expressions (which can be done using ‘strategies’), phrases and clauses, and speech acts. A brief summary of clause types and clause structures follows. The chapter then draws a sharp distinction between the order of words and the order of constituents, before turning to sentence types and discourse organization.

This chapter examines vowel contrasts in UPSID and P-base. We first divide vowels into two groups, basic and non-basic, and then search for the maximal number of contrasts in each phonetic dimension. Basic vowels involve lip rounding and tongue positions only. Non-basic vowels involve one or more additional features: nasality, creakiness, breathiness, and retroflex. It is found that, if we exclude long vowels and diphthongs and factor out tongue-root movement (ATR), there are no more than three degrees of tongue height and no more than two degrees of tongue backness. For example, we found no compelling evidence for over-short vowels, over-long vowels, voiceless vowels, or fricative vowels.